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Comment Re:Trust peer-reviewed science... (Score 1) 1486

Peer reviewed science won't burn you in eternal hellfire if you don't believe

And neither will a fictatious god. Pascals gambit is either irony at its finest, which i am inclined to believe on good days, or simply a very stupid proposal.
See this fine video to see why. It's really hard to say wether it's irony or not... was his mathematical tendency and logical thinking stronger than the retarding effect of his religion?

Comment Re:yes (Score 1) 579

[...] refusal to wear a condom despite his sexual partners begging that he do precisely that [...]

You dont happen to have a source for that claim? For a guy that supposedly doesn't watch fox news you sure eat the propaganda.

Comment Re:Sugarless gum??!? (Score 1) 160

Odds are it doesn't. I find most things are worse than what we already have, and if those bonehead scientists took 5 seconds to ask someone they'd know that.

Id pay ANY amount of money to hire this bonehead. Being able to predict the future to this degree would change a lot.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we have to research, refine and test most stuff before we find something better. And boneheads and geniuses are both notoriously bad at predicting what will be a success.

Comment Make your own (Score 1) 262

I suggest you build one on your own as most purchesable stuff is pretty flimsy with a few notable exceptions (Madcatz SFIV tournament edition is damn nice, for example).
I built mine using mdfboard, glue and some lexan glass and it is very sturdy. It has taken quite a beating from frustrated gamers and mashing beginners as
well as enduring an occasional kick without looking too shabby.

Anyway, making your own ranges from pretty simple to pretty difficult. With the simplest possible design you will finish it in a single day with a bit of effort.
Buttons, pcb and stick can be bought from the akihabarashop or lizardlick. Help can be found on the shoryuken forums' tech section.
I suggest reading through the faqs you find there, they are worthy of your time.
A note on joysticks: most american joysticks, Happ sticks for the most part, comes with a octagonal (eight sides or corners) restrictor gate.
What this means is that it has a piece of plastic shaped like an octagon that restricts the joysticks' movement. However they only come with four actuators.
Further note that the actuators are digital, on or off, nothing in between. Japanese sticks such as Sanwa and Seimitsu most often come with the square restrictor gate.
The restrictor gate is easy to swap out on the Seimitsu models and there are, for example, two way restrictor gates avaliable.
Another note on the joysticks: Happ sticks are very stiff. It will require quite a lot of force to move them about. The same is true for Happ buttons. Sanwa buttons activate
very easily whereas Seimitsus requires slightly more force.

Once you have the box ready you will need some form of joystick -> gaming device interface. I chose an old $5 playstation one pad which i got from ebay and soldered
some wires directly on it and then connection them to the buttons and the stick. Soldering on the PS1 pad can be tricky but there are plenty of guides and pictures floating
around on the shoryuken forum to guide you in the process.
Quick disconnects are highly recommended that you use since they are easy to remove should a button wear out. You can probably pick up a few for next to nothing at the local gas station.
Unless you plan on playing on your playstation this solution isnt all that great as it is. A PS1 to USB converter isnt that difficult to get though, heres a list of converters that doesnt cause input delay.
If you dont have a soldering iron or a playstation one pad handy the Chtulu/ChImp board might be of interest.

Slagcoin is a very good source of information, i highly recommend it. Byrdo takes orders from time to time and you can browse joystick vault for inspiration.
Here is my own workhorse creation. Protip: measure twice, cut once.

Good luck and please consider posting some pictures of your creation in the Show off your stick thread.

Comment Re:America Speaking Out... (Score 1) 507

Because the true believers and the mocking liberal cynics were indistinguishable, the site got bogged down in a series of purges based almost entirely on personality and loyalty to Dear Leader, rather than actual helpfulness to the "crowd"; because it simply wasn't possible to tell the "crowd" and any but its stupidest enemies apart).

I can understand this since the nutbags running/contributing to conservapedia are laughable at best. Any subject where the purely moronic or trollish statements are indistinguishable from legitimate claims are truly laughable. Not to mention that the legitimate claims arent proven either. Here is one of conservapedias more "distinguished" contributers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmyofFeILtg

A few things to note: he believes that the universe revolves around the earth, that the earth is 6000 years old and that the craters on the moon was caused by Noahs flood (!).
Nothing of value was lost.

Comment One hell of a swing (Score 1) 597

Near the last "hole" a sliced shot hit a 22-year-old passerby in the face. The 1 ½-inch foam ball caused no harm other than a sting, but when the golfers laughed at and "heckled" the victim he called 9-1-1, the police report said. Seattle police responded in force.
Say what? Who calls 911 for that?! Im guessing that he didnt have to pay for eiter, talk about a waste of time and money.

Comment Re:Anti-Spam Networks (Score 1) 187

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X) Blacklists suck
(X) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Comment Honorable mentions (Score 1) 251

It would be a shame not to mention Call of Duty 4 and its clever system. Your team actually shouts usefull things when in combat such as "RPG on the balcony second floor to the left!", at least i found it both accurate and useful.
The monkey island games are excellent examples of voiceacting and portal should be mentioned too. Who doesnt love glaDOS?
Privacy

Federal Judge Orders Schools To Stop Laptop Spying 359

CWmike writes "A federal judge on Monday ordered the Pennsylvania school district accused of spying on its students to stop activating the cameras in school-issued MacBook laptops. According to the original complaint, Blake Robbins was accused by a Harriton High School assistant principal of 'improper behavior in his home' and shown a photograph taken by his laptop as evidence. In an appearance on network television last Saturday, Robbins said he was accused by the assistant principal of selling drugs and taking pills — but he claimed the pictures taken by his computer's camera showed him eating candy. Also on Monday, the company selling the software used by the school district to allegedly spy on its students blasted what it called laptop theft-recovery 'vigilantism.'" jamie found two posts from stryde.hax pointing out suggestive information about one school district network administrator, and coaching students how to determine if their school-issued laptops were infected with the LANRev software used to operate the cameras remotely and in secret.

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